Good old Google!

In the last few weeks I’ve been reading a library book on Google and its search engine, and the way it functions. It was quite an eye-opener. (I’ve forgotten the name of the book unfortunately, because I’ve had to take it back to the library! I’ll check it out and include it here later.)

I hadn’t realised the simple fact that Google doesn’t go searching for something on the Net every time you request a search; it has already copied every item it’s spidered onto its own system, and indexed it and ranked it and done a host of other things to it. Your search then just searches Google itself. But Google doesn’t just give you a bunch of results; it takes your request and works out more about it than you can imagine. How it does this in the twinkling of an eye, I have no idea – but then I’ve never been able to work out how a computer saves a heap of information in a micro-second either. I’ve always had this theory that computers don’t actually save anything, they just pretend they do, and hope that they won’t ever get caught out!

Anyway, all that aside, I’ve just been reading an interesting piece on a blog which talks about how Google is dealing the best way to increase link popularity. Being not as technically-minded in the computer department as I’d like to be, I don’t understand it all, but boiled down it’s saying that in order to push you to the top of the search results, Google looks for now are links pointing to your website from many different sources on the internet. He goes on to say: "Page Rank is still a factor in that scenario, but there is a lot to be said about receiving 1000 links from different websites as opposed to receiving 100 links from different websites with a good Page Rank. Nobody can tell you the exact difference in the quality of one over the other but in our experience 1000 links from different websites with low levels of Page Rank work better in increasing your rankings within the organic results of Google."

I’m not sure who the writer of this particular piece, but it’s well worth reading, and comes from a site called US Web. Part of his follow-up to the info about having lots of links to a site, is to make greater use of blogs, and certainly there’s an increasing understanding that blogs can be far more than just your run-of-the-mill info machine, or john doe’s woes and misfortunes online. They’ve always been a place where links were in abundance, but in this new approach, it’s links with a purpose. Go, Link Popularity!